Archive for September, 2009

Giving because you want to give is good; finding gratitude, attention, love, empathy, appreciation or someone giving in return is a bonus. The main thing is not to require any of those things in exchange for what you give. If you do, you may well be disappointed and eventually become resentful. This is a sad consequence but often an unavoidable one if we are relying on other people’s behaviour or reactions to match our fantasies and expectations. It is particularly unfortunate if the whole well of giving is poisoned in the process.

M Scott Peck said in “The Road Less Travelled” (1990) that he had

a colleague who often tells people, ‘Look, allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. You would be better off being dependent on heroin. As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it’s there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.’

The person wasn’t suggesting taking heroin was a good idea, but merely making the point that being dependent on other people to shape how we feel or to create our happiness is not productive – in fact, it is doomed to failure.

The only things we really have any control over are our own attitudes and behaviours – other people’s are usually beyond our sphere of influence except very temporarily, if then.

So, to go back to giving, the best we can do is to give when and what we want to give and to stay in the moment, getting our fix from the giving (ie what is in our control), not immediately attaching to it an expectation or hope of an outcome or return, which would not be in our control. Not requiring an outcome or return is probably one of the most valuable contributions to our own happiness that we can make.

What people say can give you useful information, as can what they do. But to get that information you need to be paying attention – you need to be present. This means you have to be in ‘observer’ mode, rather than in a world of your own imaginings when you are with them.

When a member of your family, a friend, a partner, a lover or a colleague tells you: “I am not good in the mornings”, they are probably genuinely trying to tell you that their behaviour in the mornings is unpredictable and possibly some way short of how they would like to be. It is code for “Please don’t get upset if I snap or appear grouchy and thoughtless – it’s not personal, I just take a little time to get into the day and into my more social role around people”. For many years when I worked in an office as one of a team, we had a deal whereby we would ‘issue bad mood alerts’ on this basis – to oil the machinery of which we were parts so that there was a chance there would be less uncomfortable friction. It is worth listening to what people say, and taking it in, if it can help us to avoid pain and upset.

With this in mind, there are other situations where we would also do well to listen to what people say: when they are self-critical, for example. Choose not to believe them at your peril! The information they are imparting to you is invaluable for your well-being in relation to them. So the next time a person says, “I’m a real bitch!” or “I’m an insensitive bastard!”, don’t disbelieve them and don’t ignore what they’ve told you – or at least do allow for the fact that they may be being totally sincere.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have them in your life, but in the same way as it is wise to go into financial investments with your eyes open, it is sound to approach emotional investments with a similar awareness and desire for self-protection.

Let reality in as soon as you can, because you’ll invariably always have to let it in eventually.

We experience disappointment when things don’t turn out as we wanted, imagined or hoped. It is quite hard to get past the feeling, especially when we’ve invested a lot in a particular outcome and it doesn’t materialise. I suppose ideally the answer is not to invest in a particular outcome – just do what you have to do and stay in the moment of doing it without projecting forward what might follow or result from it. But it’s difficult to do that, and it hurts when it doesn’t work out, particularly at the time we realise that we are just not going to get our desired outcome when we want it. I used to think T S Eliot had encapsulated what life often seemed to be all about, with his:

Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment;

All things are unreal,

Unreal or disappointing… (“Murder in the Cathedral”)

But generally the feeling passes, usually because life doesn’t stop; it continues and whatever it was that was disappointing becomes one of those things you see in the rear view mirror – eventually it is gone. Often we look back on those disappointments and see them differently, either as lucky escapes, or simply as things that were not so bad. This is not just a “Pollyanna” attitude of wanting to find something to be glad about; it is just a perspective that time and distance tend to lend. I look back at some disappointments with sheer gratitude (admittedly some time later!) when I am able to see more of the picture than I could at the time, and I am genuinely able to think “thank goodness I didn’t get that job”, “how lucky I was that that situation didn’t work out”, “how amazing that I should have gone from feeling so wretched to feeling so much better, despite what I thought I’d lost!”

I tend to avoid the explanation that whatever it was “was meant to be” (or otherwise), because for me it doesn’t lead anywhere – it is conjecture, post hoc explanation, a case of finding something that fits after the event and seems to make sense of what happened, insisting on believing that it was part of some divine plan. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that – I’m just saying it doesn’t work for me. I would rather look at the reality now, what is, what has happened, rather than fantasise about what might have been. I’m not sure that fantasising about what might have been makes people happy because there is so much regret and wistfulness involved – it focuses on loss, not real loss, because it is the loss of something they never had, but perceived loss. In other words, I think it involves an avoidable feeling of loss. There is enough of the other variety – we don’t need the avoidable kind as well.

When I experience disappointment I think the most useful thing to do is to try to feel the feeling – there is no point in pretending to myself that I’m not disappointed if that is how I feel – and then to try to let it go on the basis that I don’t know what happened is not for the best – I am literally, at that particular point, not able to judge. Maybe Eliot was right all the time: he went on to say,

All things become less real, man passes

From unreality to unreality.

My experience has tended to be that generally when we look back on our disappointments we reckon that what happened was somehow for the best – we just couldn’t see it from where we were sitting at the time, so we couldn’t see that the disappointment was just another bit of unreality (and it would pass).

One day my son brought a gerbil home to live with us. We put it in a cage. Some time later the gerbil escaped. For the next six months the animal ran frightened and wild through the house. So did we – chasing it.

“There it is. Get it!” we’d scream each time someone spotted the gerbil. I, or my son, would throw down whatever we were working on, race across the house and lunge at the animal, hoping to catch it.

I worried about it even when we didn’t see it. “This isn’t right,” I’d think. “I can’t have a gerbil running loose in the house. We’ve got to catch it. We’ve got to do something.”

A small animal the size of a mouse had the entire household in a tizzy.

One day, while sitting in the living room, I watched the animal scurry across the hallway. In a frenzy I started to lunge at it, as I usually did, then I stopped myself.

No, I said. I’m all done. If that animal wants to live in the nooks and crannies of this house, I’m going to let it. I’m done worrying about it. I’m done chasing it. It’s an irregular circumstance, but that’s just the way it’s going to have to be.

I let the gerbil run past without reacting. I felt slightly uncomfortable with my new reaction – not reacting – but I stuck to it anyway.

I got more comfortable with my new reaction – not reacting. Before long I became downright peaceful with the situation. I had stopped fighting the gerbil. One afternoon, only weeks after I started practising my new attitude, the gerbil ran by me, as it had so many times, and I barely glanced at it. The animal stopped in its tracks, turned around and looked at me. I started to lunge at it. It started to run away. I relaxed.

“Fine,” I said. “Do what you want.” And I meant it.

One hour later the gerbil came and stood by me and waited. I gently picked it up and placed it in its cage, where it has lived happily ever since. The moral of the story? Don’t lunge at the gerbil. He’s already frightened, and chasing him just scares him more and makes us crazy.

One day Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. “You have no right teaching others,” he shouted. “You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake.”

Buddha was not upset by these insults. Instead he asked the young man “Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?”

The man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, “It would belong to me, because I bought the gift.”

Buddha smiled and said, “That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself.”

“If you want to stop hurting yourself, you must get rid of your anger and become loving instead. When you hate others, you yourself become unhappy. But when you love others, everyone is happy.”

The young man listened closely to these wise words of the Buddha. “You are right, o Enlightened One, “he said. “Please teach me the path of love. I wish to become your follower.”

It’s interesting how we manage to cope with different degrees of reciprocity in some of our relationships but not in others. This troubles me because it must signify the kind of non-acceptance of reality that I strive to overcome in my life.

There are friends I meet up with two or three times a year, and that works fine. I accept the relevant degree of maintenance those friendships require and don’t feel either neglected or resentful at the looseness of the bond.

Then there are other friends whom I don’t see a lot of, and don’t hear much from, who have me positively welling with upset and resentment. I am acutely aware that any contact we have is due to my making the effort, failing which it would literally wither on the vine. The bottom line is that I mind. The good news is that I mind that I mind…

It occurs to me that my response to these situations must simply be based on a desire for things to be different from how they are, even though I know it is not a winnable fight and it takes energy that could be better expended on other things. A more desirable principle would be to choose not to continue to make room for anyone in my life who does not want to be there: volunteers only – no conscripts.

It hurts to let go of people, especially if you have experiences in common and it is not your choice to let them go. But it is dysfunctional to hang on to them if it is crystal-clear from their behaviour that you are not as important to them as they are to you, especially as every time you focus on these relationships you are likely to feel disappointment and rejection.

So I am going to try to let go of them. Maybe instead of feeling disappointed and rejected I can view these retired friendships as completed cycles, storylines that have run their course having achieved what they were born to achieve for both participants. I think that way more happiness lies than to sit unhappily wishing that whatever it is weren’t so.